Warning: Parameter 2 to SyndicationDataQueries::posts_search() expected to be a reference, value given in /home4/sattek/roguepolitics.com/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php on line 298

Warning: Parameter 2 to SyndicationDataQueries::posts_where() expected to be a reference, value given in /home4/sattek/roguepolitics.com/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php on line 298

Warning: Parameter 2 to SyndicationDataQueries::posts_fields() expected to be a reference, value given in /home4/sattek/roguepolitics.com/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php on line 298

Warning: Parameter 2 to SyndicationDataQueries::posts_request() expected to be a reference, value given in /home4/sattek/roguepolitics.com/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php on line 2982014 January « Rogue Politics

“A little over a month ago, the President commuted the sentences of eight men and women who were sentenced under severe — and out of date — mandatory minimum sentencing laws,” Cole said.

“But the President’s grant of commutations for these eight individuals is only a first step. There is more to be done, because there are others like the eight who were granted clemency. There are more low-level, non-violent drug offenders who remain in prison, and who would likely have received a substantially lower sentence if convicted of precisely the same offenses today. This is not fair, and it harms our criminal justice system.

“To help correct this, we need to identify these individuals and get well-prepared petitions into the Department of Justice. It is the Department’s goal to find additional candidates, who are similarly situated to the eight granted clemency last year, and recommend them to the President for clemency consideration.”

Cole is all but ordering the various state bar associations to make lists of candidates for early release and write up their commutation petitions.

I’m certain you can translate this.

While Cole described described qualified clemency candidates as non-violent, low-level drug offenders not involved in gang or cartel activity, first-time offenders and those without what Cole called ‘an extensive criminal history’, the reality is that a great deal of leeway is going to be given on what constitutes ‘an extensive criminal history’, just as illegal aliens who are candidates for the President’s illegal ‘Dream Act’ amnesty or similar amnesty ready programs are to be forgiven for felonies like drunk driving, theft and certain types of assault.I mean really,how many first time offenders without lengthy rap sheets get long sentences? And I can also tell you from experience that most drug dealers indeed have a long criminal history (it’s not like you can get a degree and set up shop) and are connected to a gang, one of the various mafias or some organization involved in wholesale importing. Like any other retailer, drug dealers need to have a wholesaler supplying them with product. And anyone trying to sell without that connection as a freelancer usually ends up being warned once and being ‘invited’ to become an employee, as opposed to tasking a dirt nap – if he’s lucky.

The real trick here is to destroy policies like California’s 3 strikes that puts career criminals with 3 felonies in jail for life and have played a major role in cutting down on crime.And I don’t doubt in the least it will be administered mostly on racial grounds, given how our Justice Department works these days.

This won’t change things much in New York, where the citizenry has already been effectively disarmed. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it wasn’t also a move to try to gin up calls for gun confiscation in other places.

After all, a recently released felon isn’t going to go out and get a job at McDonald’s or Walmart, especially in the new Obama economy. Most of them are going to go back to the profession they know, armed with tools of that trade obtained from their connections.

This Times Our View editorial offers an interesting option: The biggest factor in reaching those goals is to get young people without insurance to enroll. That’s not happening. Plus, implementation of the ACA caused countless people with insurance to either lose their policies, pay substantially more for them, or pay more for different coverage. Lawmakers […]

Managers tasked with the overall management of a company may thirst for additional lines of business, particularly those that are related to any of the company’s existing lines. Lest it be concluded that an expansive tendency flows straight out of a business calculus, the infamous “empire-building” urge, which is premised on the assumption of being capable of managing or doing anything, is often also in play. Interestingly, this instinct can operate even at the expense of profit satisficing or maximizing. In this essay, I assess Google’s sale of its Motorola (cellular phone manufacturing) unit.

Having acquired Motorola for $12 million, Google’s selling price of $3 million may seem to reflect negatively on the management at Google. However, Google arranged to keep some of the valuable patents, and license a few of those to Motorola. “Google got what they wanted and needed from Motorola—they got patents, engineering talent and mobile market insight,” Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, explains.[1]His mention of insight is particularly noteworthy, as it pertains to the importance of innovation at Google.

Larry Page, Google’s CEO, provides us with the official rationale. “The smartphone market is super-competitive, and to thrive, it helps to be all-in when it comes to making mobile devices.”[2]Not being “all-in” implies that Google’s management would be too distracted by its main preoccupation (i.e., coming up with new software and related hardware) to concentrate on making phones better than those proffered by competitors in that manufacturing sector. Interestingly, Page omits at least two alternative rationales.

First, the quote says nothing about the institutional conflict-of-interest that is inherent in Google competing in the phone market against smartphone makers such as Samsung and HTC, which use Google’s Android operating system. Jack Gold points out that selling Motorola eases this tension.[3]

That a conflict-of-interest is more serious than mere tension seems to have alluded the financial analyst; competitors are in tension, but this is generally accepted because the benefits to society dwarf the rather limited costs (e.g., by means of government regulation). An institutional conflict-of-interest, on the other hand, brings with it only a private benefit while the costs can be widespread. From a societal standpoint at least, we do not assess conflicts-of-interest based on a cost-benefit analysis. In fact, we tend to treat the sheer existence of the exploitable arrangement to be unethical. We need only look at the societal reaction in the U.S. to CPA firms pronouncing unqualified opinions so the clients would renew the firms for the next year, and the rating agencies rating tranches of sub-prime mortgage-based bonds as AAA because the agencies earn more if the bond issue does well. Yet, strangely, Larry Page made no mention of having expunged this problem.

Secondly, Page’s statement makes the point that the company’s main pursuits would be too distracting. Alternatively, he could have pointed out that manufacturing phones would likely become a distraction from Google’s main work. This rationale makes more sense, as distractions from an adjunct operation are less costly than those impinging on what the people at a company do best.

I submit that the assumption that a heavily ideational, future-oriented company can also be good at manufacturing is more costly than any prohibitive short-term financials. The search-engine-based internet giant strikes me as being oceans of time away from the banal world of manufacturing, even concerning those products such as cell phones and internet glasses that are related to the software advances.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, trying out a pair of Google “glasses” during a meeting at Google’s headquarters. How might the innovation change war? If only it could be relegated to virtual reality .

Similar to leadership being forward-oriented whereas management encompasses implementation of existing strategies derived from innovations already part of history, Google’s forté in looking out on a horizon pregnant with practical possibilities not just to ride, but also to create the next wave in computer technology does not necessarily transfer into being good at managing a manufacturing process. Furthermore, any resources, whether financial or managerial, poured into the latter must come with an opportunity cost at the expense of the former. That is to say, opportunities would be lost in what the supervisory and non-supervisory employees at Google do best. Even hiring additional managers and labor with expertise in manufacturing would require time and money that could otherwise be devoted to inventing and mining practical ideas on the open horizon. At the very least, the “room addition” of operations could distract Google’s futurists from delivering yet another leap in technology that transforms the world in which we live.

Generally speaking, intensification can bring with it more fecundity than can expansion. The diseconomies of scale that come as costs rise disproportionately as a company’s administration and operations expand only worsen the plight of the Jack of all trades who is master of none by virtue of having a finger in many pies. What might a business calculus look like that is based on intensification? Amassing more and more charge in a well-fitting battery is doubtless very different than being oriented to spreading out across new lands while trying to conquer and hold them while protecting the home front and seeing that it continues to be productive. I suspect that the intensification instinct is more in line with profitability over all than is the power-aggrandizing urge of empire-building.

Early last year, with the sequester about to begin, President Obama stated that “these cuts are not smart, they are not fair, they will hurt our economy, they will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls.” He made this statement because Keynesian theory says government spending can boost “aggregate demand” and goose […]

This Peggy Noonan article dovetails nicely with Glenn Reynolds’ excellent column about “Irish Democracy”, which I wrote about in this post. First, here’s Dr. Reynolds’ explanation of the foundation of Irish Democracy: In his excellent book, Two Cheers For Anarchism, Professor James Scott writes: One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical […]

From Chicago Tribune News January 30, 2014:An Oak Park [Illinois]woman who became a State of the Union guest after writing President Barack Obama about her expired unemployment benefits found herself in the spotlight during Tuesday night’s address as the president spoke of her financial struggles.The WhiteHouse, which wants jobless benefits extended, declined to say where Misty DeMars worked before losing her job in May, but her LinkedIn profile listed her former employer as the Adler Planetarium. The planetarium said in May it was cutting 8 percent of its staff.According to the White House, DeMars wrote to President Barack Obama after her emergency jobless benefits expired, telling him: “We stand to lose everything we’ve worked for years to build in the matter of months.”In May, DeMars and her husband, Leighton Taylor, purchased a $262,000 home in Oak Park’s Frank Lloyd Wright Historic District, taking out a mortgage of $248,900, public records show. He works in information technology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, according to UIC’s web site.

Mrs. DeMars writing to the president said about her and her husband: ” “We are the face of the unemployment crisis.”

In the middle, poor Misty Demars

The first question I have is, with Mrs. DeMars knowing the economic conditions in the country, and knowing she worked for an employer that she must have known there would be a chance cuts could be made, and knowing the payments of a mortgage depended on both her and her husband’s salary, why would they take out a mortgage of almost $250,000 at the time they did? But maybe that’s just me wondering that as I haven’t heard anyone else bring that up.

Giving her the benefit of the doubt that she had no idea she was about to lose her position, the next question that has to be asked is, why hasn’t she been able to find a job near Chicago where she lived for so long ?

Edd Hendee-KSEV radio

Edd Hendee, a local radio host of KSEV radio station in Houston, TX [and owner of the Taste of Texas restaurant-a great steak house if I say so myself] did some research that you haven’t seen anyone else in the media do [or better said, that they care to do]. His research gives you another picture of Misty DeMars, not the one you heard from president Barack Obama at the State of the Union Address.

After you hear this you may think Edd, and me for posting, are being too harsh on just an average citizen. But she is the one who put herself out there, obviously wanting the publicity as she called herself [in her letter to the president] “the face of the unemployed in America.” And she wanted to use [or be used by the president] her status to shame those mean Republicans in extending the already over extended unemployment benefits. If at some point the extension of unemployment benefits isn’t curtailed, then a good program established to temporary help someone who has recently been employed until they can find another job, will turn into another government welfare program to give money to someone who has lost his job for the rest of his life without having to work again.

I’m sorry for the not great quality of the audio [the fault on my end] that I obtained from the KSEV Edd Hendee website podcast; so please turn up the volume to hear clearly.

Here is Edd Hendee on his radio show on KSEV on Wed. Jan 30 with the rest of the story:

Yesterday, Father Robert of Irishanglican and I got to chatting about the Royal Marines and it triggered a memory for me. If you didn’t know Fr. Robert was a Royal Marine and served with USMC in Vietnam. Along that line, never forget that we weren’t the only ones in he ‘Nam. But this was a […]

Alea iacta est…the Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and we have the results for this week’s Watcher’s Council match up.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living – Marcus Tulius Cicero

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives – Samuel Johnson

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth– Voltaire

This week’s winner, Joshuapundit’s Obama’s Loving Requiem For A Prominent Communist – And Mine is an obituary. Singer Pete Seeger passed away this week, and President Obama saw fit to issue a handsome and fulsome ( and revealing) tribute out of the White House. Since I knew a bit about whom Pete Seeger was and about his career, I thought I’d write one of my own. Here’s a slice:

The mask is coming off, even if it never covered much to begin with.Pete Seeger is dead today, at 94. And this is what our Dear Leader had to say about it:

“Once called “America’s tuning fork,” Pete Seeger believed deeply in the power of song. But more importantly, he believed in the power of community – to stand up for what’s right, speak out against what’s wrong, and move this country closer to the America he knew we could be. Over the years, Pete used his voice – and his hammer – to strike blows for worker’s rights and civil rights; world peace and environmental conservation. And he always invited us to sing along. For reminding us where we come from and showing us where we need to go, we will always be grateful to Pete Seeger. Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to Pete’s family and all those who loved him.”

Now, aside from being someone who made quite a contribution to American music, Pete Seeger was also a hard core communist and apologist for Stalin during the time when ‘Uncle Joe’ murdered over 100 million people. The forced collectivization, the murder of political opponents, the show trials, the forced famine in the Ukraine that murdered at least 3 million people, the gulags…none of it mattered at all to Pete Seeger, that ‘champion of justice and freedom’.By his own admission, he was a red diaper baby, someone who was brought into the party by his parents and raised under what the Comintern called Party Discipline. That meant you followed the orders of the Kremlin, no questions asked. And that’s exactly what Pete Seeger did. He claimed that he ‘drifted out of the party in the 1950’s’, but he never once lifted his voice to oppose Soviet tyranny until the game was almost over, in 1982 when he made statements in favor of Poland’s Solidarity movement.After the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, there were some commies who woke up to what that meant and left the Party. But not Pete Seeger! Whatever Hitler was doing to the Jews was no never mind to him. As a member of the Almanac singers (later called the Weavers) with a fellow party member, Woody Guthrie, he totally followed the Moscow line, calling for America to stay out of WWII…here’s a sample lyric: “Franklin D., listen to me,/You ain’t a-gonna send me ’cross the sea.”He and his fellow Party members lobbied aggressively against aid to Britain, American re-armament and against FDR’s selective service act, which passed in 1940 by one vote. If it hadn’t, things would have been very different after Pearl Harbor. The Almanac’s 78 recording, Songs for John Doe was so subversive even Eleanor Roosevelt, a fan of the group, denounced it.That changed abruptly in June, 1940, when Hitler invaded Russia. Then, Seeger and his friends started singing a brand new tune, urging America to get into the war and save Stalin’s posterior. In a true 1984-style example of revisionism, Seeger and his pals had all the available copies of Songs for John Doe recalled and destroyed…although enough copies remained in a few people’s hands so that we can see exactly how hypocritical, radical and anti-American these people were.After the war, Seeger remained active in shilling for Stalin and his successors. He was one of the leaders calling for clemency for the Rosenbergs, the spies who gave Stalin the atom bomb. Yes, the great world peace advocate had no problem with a homicidal maniac and mass murderer like Stalin getting the bomb.In 1945, Seeger put together something called People’s Songs, Inc, an organization designed to “create, promote and distribute songs of labor and the American People.”Here’s what the California Senate fact finding committee had to say about it:

“People’s Songs is a vital Communist front … one which has spawned a horde of lesser fronts in the fields of music, stage entertainment, choral singing, folk dancing, recording, radio transcriptions and similar fields. It especially is important to Communist proselytizing and propaganda work because of its emphasis on appeal to youth, and because of its organization and technique to provide entertainment for organizations and groups as a smooth opening wedge for Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist propaganda.”

Seeger was actually subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, but refused to answer questions about his communist past and eventually refused to answer subpoenas. He was actually tried and convicted of contempt of Congress, but his conviction was overturned over a technicality.Along with his commendable support for civil rights for blacks in America, Seeger continued to be a shill for the Soviets and ultra-Left causes throughout the years.He was a big advocate of unilateral disarmament by the West, including the Soviet’s phony International Peace Petition. In spite of his image as a champion of freedom, he had nothing to say about the Soviet repression of democratic revolutions in Hungary in 1956, or in Czechoslovakia in 1968. And of course, he was a supporter of Fidel Castro and his executioner, Che Guevara.He was predictably against the Vietnam War, but had nothing to say about the North Vietnamese gulags and fascist repression after the war, or Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge’s Killing Fields in Cambodia.He opposed President Reagan’s rearmament of the West after the Carter years, and was huge advocate of he Nuclear Freeze Movement of the 1980s, a Soviet-sponsored initiative that would have frozen Soviet nuclear and military superiority in place and stopped Reagan from defeating the Evil Empire.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Kevin Williamson NROforGreat Caesar’s Ghost submitted by Joshuapundit. Written the day of President Obama’s SOTU snoozefest, it takes apart the entire institution with wit and savage precision. Do read it.

See you next week! Don’t forget to tune in on Monday AM for this week’s Watcher’s Forum, as the Council and their invited special guests take apart one of the provocative issues of the day with short takes and weigh in…don’t you dare miss it. And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter…..’cause we’re cool like that!

This commercial by Foot Locker brings in some of the most controversial stars from the world of sports and it is extremely funny!Watch at HAS here. Advertisement Continue reading Very Funny Foot Locker commercial! (Video) . . . → Read More: Very Funny Foot Locker commercial! (Video)

This video by Jimmy Kimmel of people offering their opinions of the State of the Union Address BEFORE it took place shows the true state of our union!A mostly ignorant electorate interested more in reality show morons than in where our country is headi… . . . → Read More: Jimmy Kimmel on the real state of our union! (Video)

If people don’t take their blood pressure medication before reading this article, it isn’t because I didn’t warn them. ALERT: Don’t read this article if you have high blood pressure. Here’s what I’m talking about: Fourteen MNsure managers were paid bonuses totalling more than $26,000 in November as Minnesota launched its troubled online health insurance […]

This Week on The Reactionaries Speak Radio Program: Leaky Apps, Killer Cops, And Riding The Bus To The FEMA Camp Adult Themes Will Be Discussed, Adult Language Used. You have been warned!!!!! Join The Panel: @luchadora41 @noway90 @smokie_tx @reactionariez This … Continue reading →

14. Hence, people have here an example where they are to seek their comfort and help, not in the world; they are not to guard the wisdom and power of men, but Christ himself and him alone; they are to cleave to him and depend on him in every need with all faithfulness and confidence […]

Below is an excellent episode of Stossel, from January 9th, called “Equality versus Liberty,” where John Stossel examines the issue of income inequality. Enjoy! Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com

13. Now it is the consolation of Christians, and especially of preachers, to be sure and ponder well that when they present and preach Christ, that they must suffer persecution, and nothing can prevent it; and that it is a very good sign of the preaching being truly Christian, when they are thus persecuted, especially […]

Fourth Sunday after Epiphany; Matthew 8:23-27 And when he was entered into a ship, his disciples followed him. And, behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves: but he was asleep. And his disciples came to him, and awoke him, saying, Lord, save us: we […]

Yep, you heard it here first! If you’re a conservative, you must be raaaacist! Ok, so that’s been the drumbeat of the left forever. But hey, what else can we say when you have MSNBC doubling down on stupid all day today, Reince Priebus showing that he might actually have a pair by standing up to the wretchedly rated leftist